Is There Cake In Denmark?
by vifetoile89
Summary: Follow-up to "No More Cakes and Ale." Chell finds a copy of 'The Tragedy of Hamlet,' reads, and ruminates, finding she and the Prince have a thing or two in common. Set during the first game. One-shot. Complete.


Is There Cake in Denmark?

By Vifetoile

Disclaimer: I don't own Portal, or Chell, or even the works of William Shakespeare – though those are, helpfully, in the public domain.

For clarity's sake, this is set during the first Portal game, after Chell has escaped the Victory Candescence (i.e. the inferno) and is wandering the Facility unsupervised.

"All the world's a stage…"

Where had I heard that before? I didn't remember. I stretched out and looked around me again. I was in an observation deck. From the window I could look down into a testing chamber.

I moved the portal gun to my left hand, to shift the weight, and gave a nearby chair a push. It swiveled and swiveled, and then the top fell off.

The silence was killing me.

I remembered looking up into these windows and waving, hoping that someone was up here. Someone who might wave back. Someone else _alive_.

No such luck. Even the plant that stood in its little pot had long since withered.

Here I was. All the world was a stage. I was _back_-stage. And finding nothing.

I knelt and looked through the desk drawers. I don't know what I was looking for. But I found it, anyway.

It was a paperback. A _book_. I hadn't seen or held a book in – that was what frightened me, I couldn't tell you. I picked it up. It was small – I could hold it in one hand, or stick it into a pocket without worrying. I flipped it open.

English. Good.

The bindings were actually holding together well. Someone had taped the dust jacket with electrical tape; I thanked them quietly.

There was a little illustration of a skull underneath the title on the first page: _The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare_.

Shakespeare. I knew that name. Shakespeare was… good.

Maybe he said "All the world's a stage"?

There was no introduction, except for a brief biography of the author.

Something – an internal clock, a hiccup – reminded me that I was losing time. I had to move. I slipped the little book into my pocket and returned to exploring "backstage."

I didn't think of the book for a while.

But after a particularly grueling run – walls full of turrets! Who built this place? – I retreated backstage again, and lay against the wall, totally spent. The light was too bright to sleep. But it was bright enough to read.

I brought out the book, inspected it, read the _Dramatis Personae_, and started to read.

It opened on ramparts. I wondered if the guards were going to be the main characters, but none of them was named Hamlet. One line struck out at me –

"For this relief much thanks; 'tis bitter cold

And I am sick at heart."

I read them aloud to myself. Again. And again. Then I read the next lines – in an undertone, of course. It was good to just _hear_ something. The words seemed to want to be read. And then I shivered when the ghost appeared. Why wouldn't he say anything?

But they said that they would give news to Prince Hamlet, through that guy Horatio. I figured the story was now beginning in earnest.

I read. And I kept reading.

I lost track of time, enmeshed in the Danish court. And yes, I read it aloud to myself. Every line. Sometimes I'd come across a line that would intoxicate me with its sincerity, and I would fall silent – only to read it aloud with fervor once the silence got to me.

I read the entire play in one sitting. I could have described the look in Ophelia's eyes when Hamlet told her to go to a nunnery, I swore I saw Hamlet gesturing to the Players before they put on _The Mousetrap._ I could have conjured up the smell of the graveyard and the taste of the poisoned wine, the glint of the treacherous pearl. And I heard the boom of the cannons, louder than the whirr of the machines. Yes, Denmark became more real to me, then, than the Aperture Science laboratories.

When I finished the play, I sat back and just stared out at the wiring and configuration, thinking of nothing in particular.

And I thought some more as I stood up and walked around, to stretch my legs. Hamlet achieved his revenge, but he died in the process. That was the one fact that reverberated in my mind. I had honestly expected it to turn out okay.

It had only been a few hours, but I already thought that my ideas from when I started the story were stupid. I thought that Hamlet would kill off his uncle quickly and lickety-split, and then spend the rest of the play wooing Ophelia, uniting Denmark, and leading the country into war. But there was none of that.

One by one, Hamlet lost everyone close to him. He drove away Ophelia because she was a distraction. He couldn't trust his mother or his father's ghost, even his old friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, turned on him. He trusted the players, whom he barely knew, and Horatio, who had never been a part of the court to start with.

Honestly, I imagined Horatio looking a bit like the Companion Cube. Wearing a shirt with hearts on it, at least.

But in the end, Hamlet was all alone.

Claudius also struck an oddly familiar figure with me. His words of "mirth in funeral" and "dirge in marriage" sounded a lot like another certain tyrant that I knew of, who insisted that all was for peace and light and science, when the sick fact was that it was _all_ for peace and science, and she needed no light. "One may smile and smile and be a villain" – this Hamlet fellow knew what he was talking about.

And he had to. After all, he was all alone.

And he had to be alone – being alone, he had to trust himself, he had to cut out everything that was possibly a lie, possibly a trap, that would twist the truth and trap him.

Is there cake in Denmark?

I shook my head. Of course there's cake in Denmark.

The play was over; time for me to go back to work to escape this nutshell, where the AI was "king of infinite space." I kept Hamlet tucked in my back pocket, and he accompanied me to the very end.

However, this wouldn't be the last time that Shakespeare and I crossed paths…


End file.
